1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a pattern generator and a testing device. More particularly, the present invention relates to a pattern generator and a testing device for testing an electronic device. The present application also relates to the following application, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference if applicable.                a Japanese Patent Application No. 2004-64406 Filed on Mar. 8, 2004.        
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, a pattern generator is used in a testing device testing an electronic device. The pattern generator generates a test pattern for testing the electronic device, which is a signal input to the electronic device. A conventional pattern generator generates a test pattern using pattern data and sequence data.
The pattern generator includes a memory storing a pattern data group and a sequence data group and a cache memory storing pattern data and sequence data. The sequence data is an instruction group indicating output sequence of pattern data to generate the test pattern, and includes a jump instruction, a loop instruction, etc.
The pattern generator reads pattern data and sequence data from a memory, and stores these data on a cache memory. Moreover, the test pattern is generated using the pattern data stored on the cache memory according to the instruction group of the sequence data stored on the cache memory.
When detecting an instruction to jump to an address of the pattern data that is not stored on the cache memory in the instruction group of sequence data, the pattern generator reads the pattern data according to that address from the memory and stores the data on the cache memory. For this reason, the sequence data instructions cannot consecutively be executed by the processing speed of the pattern generator, the size of the pattern data, etc. and thus waiting time occurs in some cases. Therefore, it was difficult to efficiently generate the test pattern. Moreover, although a pattern generator detects a jump instruction, etc. from sequence data and prefetches the corresponding pattern data, the similar problem occurs. Moreover, in the testing device with the use of such a pattern generator, it was difficult to efficiently test the electronic device.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide an ink cartridge and an ink cartridge holder that can solve the foregoing problems. The above and other objects can be achieved by combinations described in the independent claims. The dependent claims define further advantageous and exemplary combinations of the present invention.